Saturday, November 26, 2016

Fake For The Future

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Stanford study is the largest one to date that focuses on how young people consume and evaluate online media. The study questioned approximately 7,084 students ranging in age from middle school to college students.

According to the WSJ, the study claims that when asked to distinguish between sponsored content and actual news article on the same website, 82 percent of students were unable to tell the difference, and nearly 70 percent of students felt no reason to distrust a financial article written by the CEO of a major bank. Visual stimulus ranked as extremely important to students, with many defining the trustworthiness of a tweet based on the size of attached photos and the tweet’s level of detail.

The WSJ also reports that the study suggests that students find it hard in the digital age to evaluate the credibility of online news sources, and that although many schools now offer media literacy courses, the dwindling number of librarians has left many students with an inability to research properly.